For the seventh straight year, local organizations will receive more than $1 million for use towards breast cancer education, screenings, and treatment initiatives. The Pittsburgh Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure said that the $1.8 million in grants is the largest amount handed out at one time in the history of the affiliate.

Kathy Purcell, executive director of the local chapter, said a large proportion of the money will go to the Mammogram Voucher Program (MVP). Through the MVP, Adagio Health provides women in need with free mammograms and follow-up services.

Mark Zuckerberg brought his college tour to Pittsburgh on Tuesday. The 27-year-old Facebook founder and CEO was on the Carnegie Mellon University campus along with Facebook's vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, scouting talent for the social networking site.

Internet users looking to stop companies from tracking them online are having a hard time using common opt-out tools, according to a report from Carnegie Mellon University.

The growth of Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) — advertising that targets individuals based on their online activity — has some privacy advocates pressing for more regulations limiting the information that companies can gather.

Electric vehicle charging stations are being installed around the Pittsburgh area, with nine likely in use by next spring. The Eaton Corporation announced that they will eventually install 45 stations along Interstate 376, which they say will move Pittsburgh to the forefront nationwide in promoting this technology.

John White, Program Manager for Acquisition Integration at Eaton, said that installations along the parkway will make all of the stations useful and accessible.

Environmental activists are urging the Allegheny County Board of Health to act more quickly on updating air quality regulations.

Tom Hoffman, Executive Director of Clean Water Action, said the County's current air quality guidelines for industrial and commercial structures are outdated and contribute to the Pittsburgh area's "bad air."

"They were written when Reagan was in the White House and the space shuttle program was brand new," said Hoffman. "Now, both of those are gone and we still have the same tired, old guidelines."

When fully implemented, the Affordable Care Act will save Pennsylvania households earning less than $100,000 a year an average of $2,370. That's according to "The Bottom Line: How the Affordable Care Act Helps Pennsylvania Families," a report from Families USA, a non-profit, non-partisan health consumer group.

All provisions of the Affordable Care Act will be fully implemented in 2014. Numbers in the report are for 2019, giving the law a few years to become established.

UPMC will invest nearly $300 million into a new research facility that will focus on cancer and aging along with personalized medicine.

"Right now we take care of diseases that are really syndromes," said Chief Medical and Scientific Officer Steven Shapiro. "Patients have different susceptibility of those diseases, different courses of those diseases, different drugs that one person may respond better to. This is a way of finding the appropriate variation for an individual, to tailor treatment toward that individual."

PennEnvironment released new data Thursday showing that Pennsylvania ranks fourth in the nation for solar jobs, down from second last year. According to a new report from the Solar Foundation, the number of solar workers in the state has dropped from 6,700 to 4,703 at 750 businesses. Nationally, solar industry employment grew by 6.8% last year to about 100,000 workers at 17,000 locations.

Legislation establishing a protocol for managing possible concussions in Pennsylvania's student athletes passed the State House unanimously yesterday afternoon and is expected to pass in the Senate soon after it re-convenes October 17th. Among other provisions, it specifies when an athlete must be removed from play and what steps must be taken before he or she is allowed to return.

If you've ever been in a rush to see a show in downtown Pittsburgh but can't find a parking space, the free, real-time smartphone application ParkPGH might be able to help.

ParkPGH was awarded the National Transportation Award on Monday. The app provides parking information for 25% of the garages downtown. It calculates the number of open parking spaces in the Cultural District every 30 seconds and delivers the locations to users.

For this year's Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Pittsburgh affiliate is urging women to move beyond awareness and take steps to prevent breast cancer. The slogan is "Less talk, more action."

New research from the University of Pittsburgh has found that simply adding a new vaccine to an existing supply chain can actually do more harm than good. "If your goal is to get new vaccines out to people with a goal of trying to prevent substantial diseases, you can actually inhibit the flow of other vaccines," said Bruce Lee, M.D, assistant professor of medicine, epidemiology and biomedical informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. "If you don't have enough planning you can inadvertently do more harm than good."

The Allegheny County Health Department is marking World Suicide Prevention Day Saturday by reminding residents just how big of a problem suicide can be.

"Between 2005 and 2008, the Health Department's Child Death Review Team examined 19 suicides countywide involving adolescents 14 to 19 years old or about five a year," said Review Team member Jennifer Fiddner. Suicides account for about 3% of sudden deaths in that age group according to Fiddner

Starting in January battery-operated monitors will be strapped to telephone and light poles in downtown Pittsburgh to measure diesel pollution. The Allegheny County Board of Health has approved spending $860,000 for the three year study to be conducted by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Jim Thompson, the county Health Department's Air Program Manager, said the goal is to determine when and where diesel emissions are the highest. "Our efforts have been somewhat scattered," said Thompson.

Cases of a novel flu virus have been identified in three children with ties to the Washington County Fair according to the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Agriculture. The first child to become ill has fully recovered while the other two are still healing. The state has not released any information about the three.

A new civic organization is asking experts and ordinary citizens to weigh in on how natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale has impacted Pennsylvania and its residents.

The Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission will gather public testimony and professional opinions at five late-summer meetings across the state, with the intent of making policy suggestions to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett and state lawmakers this October.

Power companies are updating their websites with power outage maps, and eastern Pennsylvania is covered with outage dots. The state Public Utility Commission reports some 385,400 Pennsylvania homes are without electricity as of 4:00 PM Monday in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene.

The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) said coordination after Tuesday's earthquake went according to plan. The scope of the quake was small enough that PEMA allowed various state agencies, including PennDOT and the Public Utility Commission, as well as nuclear power plants, to work independently to send out status updates.

Consol Energy announced this week that it's selling half of its interest in Marcellus Shale drilling in Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Houston-based Noble Energy for $3.4 billion. A local energy expert says that he expects such deals to continue. "The amount of available shale gas is so great that it's becoming beyond the ability of any company to develop its own acreage," said Kent Moors of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Duquesne University.

The infant mortality rate rose by 7% in Pennsylvania since 2000 but the death rate among children ages 1 to 14 fell by 10%. Those are 2 of the 10 indicators examined in the 2011 KIDS COUNT Data Book that tracks the well-being of children in each state and nationally.

A major Marcellus Shale drilling company is challenging an Allegheny County municipality's decision to restrict drilling. Last month officials in South Fayette Township approved an ordinance that requires drillers to obtain a land operations permit for each well, and it creates buffers around schools, hospitals and certain types of businesses.

Motion-capture technology, used for movies like Avatar or Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, will someday be available to the general public. People will be able to record motion capture and will be able to feel physical sensations as they watch movies or play video games.

Natural gas suppliers who drill in the Marcellus Shale will be able to use a new processing facility by the start of 2013.

Dominion Resources has announced it will build a major natural gas processing facility in Natrium, in the panhandle of West Virginia. The $500 million project is slated for completion by the end of next year.

Dominion spokesman Dan Donovan said the plant will be the second of its kind for the energy company, more versatile than the sub-processing facilities currently used. It will be able to process 200 million cubic feet of natural gas every day.